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This article first appeared in the November 2025 issue of Australian Printer, authored by Posterboy Printing’s Daniel Edwards
I recently had the dubious pleasure of dealing with a digital marketing company – the kind that does Adwords and web design, and makes everything sound much more mysterious than it actually is.
It’s amazing how these people talk about monthly budgets, particularly in comparison to my experience in the print industry. I feel like printers are always trying to save their customers money,
or at least find ways to charge less.
The classic one for me was always economies of scale – increase the quantity and drive down the cost per unit. My focus has always been on getting the best deal for my customers. Rather than crafting an offer to suit a low budget, these Adwords guys berate their customers to spend more.
If you want real results, you need to actually spend some money – anything less than $1,000 a month and you’re wasting your time. You really want to be spending at least $1,800 a month. It also won’t start performing for at least three months because of technical setbacks, and so on. But once you do that, you will be drowning in leads.
The Adwords guys are so bold, and what is so compelling about their pitch is the numbers.
Google and Facebook are very open about search traffic, how much each click will cost, and how they arrive at those prices. Using all that data, it is quite straight forward to arrive at a reasonably accurate estimation for cost per customer.
Once the ads are going, a website will get a predictable amount of traffic, and it is over to the web master to increase the conversion rate.
What was interesting about all of this, was how easy it is for marketers to put a price on new customer acquisition. And how available this information was. Could the print industry take advantage of these figures?
The Google click rate is a price for just a click – not an action, or a purchase – just a click on a link that in most cases leads to an interaction time that is less than five seconds. A very basic engagement with
a website that is comparable to picking up and glancing at a flyer, or a business card.
Recent figures I saw for Adwords for a plumbing business, as an example, was $30 a click. Could printers use this to frame their prices?
Here’s a snapshot of metrics comparing Google clicks and the power of print:
| Metric | Google Click ($30) | Print Touch ($2) |
| Engagement depth | 4–15 sec glance | 30–120 sec read (Catalogues, Top Ten Reasons – Letter Box Distributers) |
| Household penetration | 1 person | 2.4 people (Private Life of Mail – Royal Mail) |
| Retention | Gone on refresh | Kept 17 days avg. (Private Life of Mail – Royal Mail) |
| Trust signal | “Ad” label | Tangible, authentic |
| Cost per meaningful impression | ~$15–$30 | $0.83 (at $2 per unit if 2.4 people see it) |
Google will charge you $30 per engagement. I can put a flyer in the hands of X number of people and it will cost $2 per engagement. Then I can back it up with some stats – 81 per cent of Australians open and read their mail immediately, 74 per cent pay complete attention when reading emails, and
56 per cent of people trust information when it is presented on paper.
Direct mail is often kept for months, and is read by every person in the household, not just the person it is addressed to. The online component of a typical marketing campaign pays back 64 per cent more when there is direct mail in the marketing mix.
These stats are very direct mail oriented, but it is true for any take home form of print. There are many more data points in my book, and available at TwoSides.org.au.
On the below left is a snapshot of metrics comparing Google clicks and the power of print.
Suddenly your $2 flyer isn’t competing with a $30 click — it’s 36x cheaper
per deep impression.
One of the best ways to promote anything is to stand against something else. Pepsi didn’t win by being ‘another cola’ – it won by blind-tasting Coke into oblivion.
Burger King didn’t say ‘we grill’ – it said ‘better than the clown’. Ryanair didn’t promise luxury – it promised ‘screw the suits, fly cheap’.
Print doesn’t need to apologise for ink on paper. It needs to call out the click fraud: $30 for a four-second bounce? We’ll give you 87 seconds in hand for $2. Google sells noise. We sell memory. Choose your weapon.
Comment below to have your say on this story.
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